On Seeing Further

If I have seen farther it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
– Isaac Newton

Recently I’ve been planning out how I will be building my business over the upcoming year. I already have my goals for 2011, but I needed to further define my roadmap for building a business. In order to shorten my learning curve, I’ve been learning as much as I can from people who have done already it.

Since my business will be solely online, I searched out people who have built successful online businesses. Though most of the sources I looked at were targeted toward bloggers, I was still able to find a lot of valuable content in each of them. Even though my business won’t be a traditional blog, I will be utilizing many of the same strategies that bloggers would be to build awareness of my business and gain customers.

Sources I’m Using

Over the last couple of weeks I have been reading quite a bit, and taking notes from the sources I’ve been exploring. These notes will help me to build my site in the most efficient way; from the actual construction of the web pages to maximizing the time I put into networking. (Note: All of these are free resources, though you may have to trade an email for some of them. Well worth it!)

279 Days to Overnight Success – Chris Guillebeau is a professional writer who I greatly admire. In this manifesto he outlines how he built his writing career in less than a year.

6 Figure Blogger Blueprint – David Risley started his first website in 1997 and has been making his living online since the turn of the century. This Blueprint outlines the steps he took to do this, minus the mistakes he made.

201 A-List Tips to Rock Your Blog – There’s a lot of information out there, and these tips from Leo Babauta and Mary Jaksch do a fabulous job of narrowing down what you need to know. Each of the tips are short and extremely useful. There’s no fluff here, and I know that I will be returning to it repeatedly to keep learning.

How to Failproof Your Business video series – This video series by Naomi Dunford and Dave Navarro is amazing! I’m still watching through the eight videos and taking notes, and have bookmarked them for future reference.

My plan is almost complete. Using the guides above, I have been able to create a roadmap that is very likely to help me reach the goal I am aiming for. By standing on the shoulders of those who came before me, I will be able to avoid some of their mistakes and possibly go further than they have.

Are you learning from those who go before you? With their help, what could you accomplish?

One can easily get over-whelmed with the ocean of information that is available. To further complicate matters, there are often multiple ways to reach a goal. The trick is to find one or two systems that will work for you and just decide to go with them. (I’m not doing exactly what any of these resources are aimed at, so I had to pick and choose the most important pieces to help me reach my goals.)